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Portfolio Night

I was lucky enough to go to Portfolio Night 6 last night. Set up by the enterprising young dudes behind http://ihaveanidea.org/ it’s billed as a chance for young creatives to meet creative directors (for a fee of £10). I felt like it was a chance for me to meet young talented people (for a fee of nothing with a couple of beers thrown in for free).

Without giving away any personal details about people that I saw I was amazed at the disparity in skills that I saw. Some of it was obviously about talent. But there were a bunch of people who’d obviously been given a really rubbish schooling in what ‘advertising’ is all about. A shocking image with a quirky line and a logo (bottom left invariably bottom right invariably [thanks Ben for pointing out my stupid error]) can’t be the basic unit of advertising any more, can it?

I met a few youngsters that really stood out: if I thought I could hide Jai and Wal from the world and keep them as my little secret I’d be tempted. But they’re already out there, blogging with the best of them and doing placements at great places. So they’ll be fine whatever happens.

There’s another couple that I really really liked, but I’m keeping them secret for now whilst ‘discussions’ take place…

I hope my comments were useful to the people I spoke to. I’m not sure they were mostly. But I hope at least I was polite and respectful (unlike some of my contemporaries who I heard being a little bit mean if I have to be honest…).

we certainly appreciated your comments, and are trying to rectify our problems. Im pretty sure I know what your talking about with the shocking image and im not ashamed to say it could be us because we know we’re only adbabies in this industry. But we’ll get better…

Rachel – that particular comment wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular. There was a definite tendency in the majority of books that I saw towards that kind of approach so please don’t take that personally.